Democracy and Tragedy in Ancient Athens
The birth of the West’s first great democracy in ancient Athens coincided with the political ascendancy of tragic drama. For those who know anything of democracy today, this would no doubt seem a strange proposition. To think: the origins of our democracy are somehow linked to this peculiar art form which conveyed the antithesis of progress and individual agency. Be that as it may, to the Athenians that first invented democracy and staged tragedy, the relationship shared by these two institutions was inimitable and central to fifth-century Greek existence.
Why was this so? What was it about democracy in ancient Athens that encouraged, and even needed, the ascendancy of tragedy? Why and how did the mass performance of tragic drama play so central a role in the democratic polis?
Drawing in large part on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, the twentieth-century philosopher of autonomy whose account most succinctly identified the fundamental links shared between democracy and tragedy in ancient Athens, this chapter will demonstrate that both democracy and tragedy, individually and as a symbiosis, evoked and were evocative of a similar world view. For democracy, this world view, as Castoriadis puts it, was captured by the push for self-institution and self-limitation.1 For us to understand what these dual concepts mean today, it is important that we first realize something fundamental about democracy in the Athenian sense. Unlike the way it is customarily perceived and practiced today, the West’s first great democracy did not emerge as a ready-made or stable set of institutions and customs. It did not pertain solely to the notion that franchise and rational deliberation would eventually yield progress. This perhaps is to state the obvious; though there remains a sizeable community of democrats who continue to view democracy in almost ahistorical terms, choosing instead to believe that democracy is, as it has always been, a vehicle to ferry human beings towards greater political enlightenment.
Yet, such an approach simply will not do if we are to understand democracy in the Athenian sense. In order to be able to do this, we are required to suspend the familiar set of ideas we associate with democracy today for a practice and mentality which, in antiquity, was known equally for its promise as well as its utter destructiveness.2 Being radical, it was also dangerous, volatile and inequitable. Achievements aside, democracy was far from perfect. Political consciousness and participation, the expansion of equality and citizenry rights, as well as the increasing ability to reconcile oneself with others all flourished together, being, in many cases, inseparable from the horrors of imperialism, slavery, patriarchy and exclusion. But this was precisely democracy’s aim: to create and then destroy, expand and then retreat, to self-institute and then self-limit. By doing so, democracy symbolized the beautiful yet ominous equilibrium between that which was and that which was not in the world of ancient Greece. For Castoriadis, this is why Greek, especially Athenian, democracy was so unique and intriguing.3
Tragedy featured in this scheme of things because it dramatized a world view that emphasized the intrinsic homelessness of The Human Condition in a world that could not always be known or predictable.4 The existential truth that tragedy exposed, in Castoriadis’ words, was the understanding that our ‘Being is Chaos’.5 In this way, because what comprises us can also be what unravels and confounds us, the newly democratized polity viewed tragedy as a personal source of democratic inspiration. The dramas staged by the tragedians encapsulated the democratic spirit to the extent that it called on all, in Charles Segal’s words, to be open to the ‘disintegration of the cosmic, social, or psychological order without losing all sense of coherence’.6 Thus, it was not long before tragedy found itself elevated by democracy to check the fateful rise – and decline – of democracy. Drawing from and exuding to the democratic polis, tragedy reminded the Athenians that no single voice or way of life was absolute or wholly true. Truth, instead, resides in the cacophony of voices, the composite of all life. Highlighted through these dramas were the differing, contradictory and competing actors, perspectives and choices that populated and made meaningful their democracy.7 As an institution of civic life, tragedy gave back to democracy what democracy had first given Athens: the fleeting awareness that the pursuit of totality has its limits; indeed, that the very core of existence is limited.
This chapter engages with these ancient institutions at length. To do so, it will rely loosely on the methods pioneered by the so-called Paris School of cultural history. According to this approach, what is crucial when trying to understand ancient institutions and practices are their history and being. For our purposes, this means that we must view democracy and tragedy from two seemingly incongruous planes of analysis if we are to understand them today: historiography and ontology. Nothing less, according to Christian Descamps, can adequately account for ancient Greece. As he writes,
To study Greece, in fact, is always to rediscover a sort of aporia. On the one hand, there is the Greek language, the famous term “Being,” and, on the other hand – though all this is connected – one witnesses the birth of the organization of the City, a type of practical reflection.8
Reflecting on ‘being’ and ‘the organization of the City’, specifically, requires undertaking two interrelated tasks.
The first task is to approach texts – about democracy and tragedy – in relation to their historical contexts. This means that when interpreting democracy and tragedy, it is essential to be mindful of the social, political, economic and cultural milieu in Athens that germinated the institutions and practices under examination. Josiah Ober reminds us that historical texts are really symbol systems whose meanings do not exist in a vacuum,9 and, as such, they cannot be interpreted or understood this way. Texts are representative of their environment and they form part of a whole. For Stephen Greenblatt, that whole can encompass, for instance, the broader genre or discipline which embodies the texts, the grounds for its creation, practice and performance, as well as the responses of the participants involved.10 In their attempt to read Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, John Winkler and Froma Zeitlin demonstrate just what this method involves. Interpreting a Greek tragedy today, they argue, requires that a reader concentrates not only on the script but also on the ‘extratextual aspects’, violating traditional philological methodologies in the process.11 Such an approach is more holistic since it must ‘look behind the masks and under the costumes and peer out into the audience, and investigate the various elements that went into a finished performance’. It should also consider ‘what happened before and after the plays and take notice of other locations in ancient Athens, like the Assembly and the law courts, where para-dramatical social events took place’.12 What is important about this approach is its rejection of accounts that claim to be objective and ahistorical in its reading of a text. And it certainly rejects that ‘“the text is the thing!” and the only thing’.13 Instead, understanding a text is to attempt to understand the webs of power that gave it specific meaning and significance, and these always have their sociopolitical reference points.14 Likewise, for us to understand the symbiosis of democracy and tragedy today, we must engage equally in a range of different practices spread across a range of different disciplines, for example, history, literary criticism, politics, art, philosophy, anthropology and economics.
The second task also approaches texts in terms of their context, but this time it understands context to incorporate ontological contexts.15 These, according to Jean-Pierre Vernant, comprise categories of thought and reasoning, values and beliefs, as well as the various means through which sense and sensibilities are given form.16 Together, they constitute what it is ‘to be’: what type of human being and humanity is made possible under these conditions, offering motives and reasons for the actions they undertook. Only by analysing context this way, can we read democracy in light of tragedy and vice versa, which is what they demand of interpreters today.
But, before this chapter begins its analysis, two brief disclaimers need emphasizing. The first concerns the exceptions to the symbiosis of democracy and tragedy. Given tragedy’s reputation, the reality is that it soon spread to city-states throughout Greece and beyond – irrespective of whether that city-state was democratic or not.17 Additionally, the continued survival and revivals of tragedy throughout subsequent centuries, for the most part, have occurred within societies which were vehemently anti-democratic. Even Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the more ardent contemporary supporters of tragedy, alluded to the disparity between democracy and tragedy.18 In addition, there is the critique that the use of democratic ideology to interpret tragedy, and vice versa, can produce any number of results and unnecessary biases.19 These qualifications are important and need highlighting. But they should not detract from the point that the institutions of democracy and tragedy ‘shared time, space and spirit’.20 Today, it is this spirit that is worth exploring, particularly as the virtue of democracy has become near universal and its meaning rigid and indisputable.
The second caveat comes in the form of a rider. Despite the admission that democracy was not perfect – being a system based on inequalities and exclusions itself – we must acknowledge that tragedy too had limits. Both institutions faced very real obstacles in reality, which denied them attaining their full potential. Democracy sustained a city-state, in part, because it was sustained by a slave economy that denied women, foreigners and youths their political rights. And tragedy, even though it dramatized democracy’s pitfalls and double standards, did not always have a tangible or immediate political impact. This is evidenced by the persistence of democratically induced slavery, patriarchy, xenophobia and aggression. Moreover, as the next chapter will touch upon, tragedy would itself be ridiculed by particular factions for imbuing inappropriate emotional responses in its audiences, ones adverse to a stable political order. A romanticization of ancient Greece is often easy to propound, even if the consequences of doing so, as Costas Constantinou reminds us, can be dire.21 The hope is that this book will avoid the worst of these dangers while still being able to draw applicable insights from Athenian democracy and tragedy for today. Doing so means that, at times, it necessarily skews the analysis to the benefits produced through these institutions, these being the traits it hopes to emphasize and learn from.
Divided into two sections, the chapter introduces Athenian democracy and tragedy in such a way as to illuminate their overlaps. In the first section, it articulates democracy – the socio-historical milieu in which it emerged, the idea, the institutions and the practices – as an existential paradox premised on both self-institution and self-limitation. This is what rendered the polis susceptible to tragedy. The second section offers an account of tragedy and explains why it became such a crucial democratic institution in Athens. Here, Castoriadis’ articulation that tragedy dramatizes our Being as Chaos will be particularly instructive for understanding tragedy’s ability to speak to the Athenians’ efforts at self-institution and self-limitation.
Democracy as self-institution and self-limitation in ancient Athens
But first, the objective is to highlight some of the key socio-historical, institutional and existential shifts that underpinned the rise of democracy in Athens. Doing so will help us understand what it was about democracy that encouraged, even needed, the ascendancy of tragedy.
Of course, the tenor that this account will take is not to document every social, political and philosophical component of Athenian democracy, not that this is even strictly possible. Its goal, rather, is to paint a portrait of democracy that is broad of brush so as not to detract from the real task: to problematize the modern mindset that perceives democracy as a wholly structured, predictable and even inevitable phenomenon. Indeed, by underscoring the often violent struggles and tensions, the continuous creation and re-creation and the severe relapses and intrinsic flaws, it will reveal how Athenian democracy represented an endless process whereby convention was pitted against innovation, hierarchy against equality, violence against peace and one voice against the many.22
The result sees a story whereby democracy was more or less, in Farrar’s words, ‘cobbled together’ over a period of several centuries.23 Though it is commonly agreed that the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508/507 BC signified the key ideological and institutional shift towards democracy,24 the question of democracy’s birth is a topic that arouses more debate than one would expect. For some, democracy’s emergence can be dated as far back as the establishment of Solon’s constitution in 594/593 BC25 or, for others, as far forward as the restored democracy of 403/402 BC.26 We need to be concerned with this ambiguity, and with these particular individuals and events, only to the extent that they illustrate something of the organic and erratic development of democracy in Athens, a phenomenon that took various forms and transpired over an expansive period of nearly three centuries.
During this epoch though, it is fair to say that the Athenian landscape underwent tremendous changes in almost every respect. For one, we see in this period an increase in both the centrality and occurrence of trade, warfare and imperialism in the Athenian way of life. Additionally, several significant democratically inspired redivisions of Athens’ social classes also took place. Given this, it was not long before new ambitions and fields of activity arose to accommodate the nascent forms of knowledge and political expectations that had germinated.
But why did this happen? And how did it happen? What were the historical and social triggers for the emergence of the democratic spirit? To answer these questions, a brief account of some key paradigmatic shifts experienced in and around Athens may help shed some light.
Given that the total sum of these shifts would themselves fill the pages of many books over, we obviously cannot go into exact historical accounts. Rather, all that we can do is offer some rough political background to the rise of democracy. For this reason, maybe only three shifts really warrant a mention in this context. The first is the fusion of families, clans and tribes, which occurred throughout Attica from around 1050 to 750 BC.27 These changes were crucial because they symbolized the antecedents of what would later be known as the polis. Though initially created for the purposes of acquiring greater security and stability, these groupings soon became much more. Indeed, as the size, number and complexity of poleis grew, life within these social units was slowly transformed into something else; the pursuit of victory, beauty and excellence being foremost among them. As an enduring tribute to Greek civilization, the polis would grow to become a largely non-bureaucratic form of society that cherished aesthetic pursuits and agonistic competition. It would prove central to the Greeks’ way of life in the coming centuries, especially life under democracy.
A second notable event in this story charts the moves towards greater equality in Athens, particularly as a result of the reforms instituted by Solon and then Cleisthenes. While the finer institutional details will be discussed later, it is important to flag now that the movement towards democracy in Athens was not neat, but triggered in large part by mass discontent.28 The reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes, two of Athens’ foremost statesmen, appeared against historical periods of pervasive indebtedness, enslavement, dictatorship and civil strife, when a wealthy aristocratic class was splintered from the lowly peasant classes.29 In its place, Solon and Cleisthenes sought to reorganize society by clearing debt, protecting individual freedoms, disrupting traditional class allegiance and structures and, perhaps most importantly, by shattering the autocratic monopoly on office-holding. Neither schemes were perfect. Both were met with violent resistance and tyrannical rule. And yet, for all that was wrong and for all that still needed improving, these reforms embedded an irrepressible kernel of equality within the social consciousness of the Athenians. Indeed, due in large part to these reforms, one’s status soon became decreasingly dependent on birth and class and more on individual capacity and persistence. In saying this though, we can too easily exaggerate these developments, which did not extend to improving the social standing of women, slaves, youths and the foreign residents of Athens.30
But still, they did begin to move the political consciousness of the masses, and this constitutes the third key shift. Made clear through the defining battles of the Persian Wars at Marathon and Salamis was the realization that the Athenian hoplites (citizen-soldiers) and thetes (free men not of the landed class), men who comprised mainly the middle and lower classes, would be at the forefront of any greatness which the Athenians laid claim to. Both victories, which had been purchased with the sacrifices and ingenuity of the Athenian masses, meant that they could henceforth regard themselves as fundamental to the newfound security, notoriety and advancement of their polis.31 Through these military triumphs, the fruits of Solon’s and Cleisthenes’ efforts could finally be said to have materialized.
However, it is crucial to point out that these innovations in social structure, equality and mass political awareness also triggered their share of instability, relapses and reprisals. From individual families, clans and tribes emerged poleis composed of varying families, clans and tribes; from the rule of elites, we read of their overthrow and the institution of greater equality which followed and finally, drawing from the heroic figures of the Greek myths for inspiration and daring, the hoplites and thetes demonstrated what the masses were capable of, if given the opportunity. Yet, as destabilizing as these shifts were, such was the ferment from which democracy would eventually emerge.
As such, the point that we should take away is that without these paradigmatic shifts, democracy might not have sprouted when and where it did. This, however, is not to say that any of these shifts, whether by themselves or in toto, were in fact directly responsible for the establishment of democracy in Athens. They were not. To draw such a conclusion would simply be taking the inference too far. A more accurate assessment would need to temper its interpretation of the facts. It might stress that, for example, while these shifts did not in and of themselves immediately trigger democratization, they would have nonetheless triggered an outflow of other initiatives and activities more apposite to the emergence of democracy.
This is how we can approach a number of innovative institutions and procedures that sprouted up in the aftermath of these various paradigmatic shifts: as mechanisms created to accommodate and reinforce these socio-historical shifts. Together, the function they performed was vital for Athens’ burgeoning democracy, being the first institutions and procedures to channel popular will into something that would eventually resemble popular rule.
This began, in many ways, with Solon and his constitutional reforms to alter the existing customs that had governed Athenian political participation and office-holding. By first dividing the Athenian citizenry into four wealth-based classes and then by redefining political franchise, his constitution established the foundation upon which Athens’ democracy would be built. Specifically, what Solon did was to restrict the eligibility for participation in the Areopagus (Aristocratic Council) to Athens’ richest class, whereas participation in the Boule (the Council) was limited to its second and third classes, while the Ekklesia (the Assembly) and courts became the preserve of Athens’ lowest class.32 It is true that such a division can hardly be considered democratic by today’s standards. Yet, as a first step, the democratic significance of these institutional reforms cannot be understated. And in any case, as the push for democracy became stronger, these institutions naturally underwent tremendous transformations, ranging from the Boule’s expansion and the increasing significance of the Ekklesia to the eventual abolition of the aristocratic Areopagus.
Thus, despite its modest beginnings, it was the Ekklesia that would come to initiate policy and make decisions with an authority that was total at the height of democracy’s prominence. As the people’s assembly, it can be loosely likened to modern-day lower houses of parliament. All enrolled Athenian citizens over the age of 18 were permitted to attend and address the Ekklesia on all matters from taxation, the declaration of war, the signing of treaties, to issues of public works.33 This, of course, did not always translate into overwhelming public attendance, even though numbers ranging from 5,000 to 13,000 citizens were not uncommon.34 Despite this, and despite the fact that the majority of attendees would not have spoken, the size, openness and sheer unpredictability of such an assembly would have ensured a greater number of voices and issues being publicized in Athens than any time before.
The Boule, on the other hand, worked independently of the Ekklesia to check the Ekklesia. A representative council of citizens, the Boule was initially made up of 400 citizens following Solon’s social redivision, although that figure was later extended to 500 citizens after Cleisthenes’ division of Attica.35 Comparable to modern-day upper houses, the Boule guided and prepared the work done in the Ekklesia, although it could not itself initiate new policies and laws for enactment. Also, like the upper houses of contemporary democracies, the Boule was more proportionally representative than the Ekklesia, as Bouleutai (councilors) were chosen by lot to equally represent all the tribes of Attica.36 On top of this, prospective Bouleutai had to be over the age of 30 and could only ever serve two one-year terms. This ensured that the Boule would, in theory, be more experienced and learned than its counterpart. It was envisaged as a safeguard placed on an Ekklesia prone to naivety, manipulation and excess.
For a long time, both the Ekklesia and Boule were subject to the rule of the Areopagus, an institution composed solely of aristocrats.37 As the oldest permanent institution in the Athenian polis, the existence of the Areopagus remained a vestige of Athens’ aristocratic past, even as its powers were progressively delimited under democracy. That said, it was not until the reforms of Ephialtes in 462/461 BC that the Areopagus had all its functions, bar the jurisdiction to try homicide cases, transferred to the Ekklesia, Boule and popular courts.38 These courts, composed of everyday citizen-jurors, heard and determined matters of law brought before it by other citizens.39
Cumulatively, what these institutions did was to disperse power and affect a spike in political volatility and the politicization of issues which had previously lain dormant within the Athenian polis. No longer was one’s life to be dictated from above. Nor was power to be conceived solely as an unimpeachable good possessed only by an elite few. Instead, democratic life demanded of its citizens a mentality and agenda that would celebrate, question and reform the very freedoms and responsibilities that they now possessed. The product was often messy, uncertain, conceited and even disastrous. In the face of this, all that the democrats could do was to continue to draw from an array of sources so that they might be better prepared to express and understand the nascent anxieties which had begun to taunt their lives. Institutions like the Ekklesia, Boule and popular courts were indispensable to this end.
Just as indispensable to the democratic effort were a number of key procedures that were put in place to ensure that power would never become concentrated in the hands of a minority and to encourage citizens to remain politically active. There is any number of procedural innovations which can be drawn together with the onset of democracy in Athens. But again, the point to remember is that this overview is not to catalogue all institutions and procedures as much as to offer a sample of how these various mechanisms played their part in inspiring and extending democratic practice.
In this way, a good illustrative example we can turn to is the procedural shift which was set up to alter the method by which the Boule was comprised; a procedure which came about through Cleisthenes’ redivision of Attica. Even more radical than Solon’s wealth-based division, Cleisthenes’ design to create 10 new tribes (phylai) disrupted and ultimately destroyed traditional loyalties and monopolies of power. In their stead, these new tribes – which were composed of three intermediate political units (trittyes), each made up of smaller, local communities (demes) – fused the local with the central in a fashion that united elites with non-elites, rural with urban and local governments with the central government.40 By undermining the old order, this redivision founded a new order that was chaotic at heart. Procedurally, each of these 10 tribes was then required to supply 50 Bouleutai to make up the Boule or the Council of 500.41 The initial rationale and eventual impact of these arrangements was to rupture established social cleavages, and their corresponding inequalities, in the formation of new, diverse communities. From slaves, foreigners, women and men to those of former-aristocratic heritage, democratic Athens was therefore, within certain limits, becoming more a fusion that melded unity with a sense of bedlam.42 Somewhat emblematic of this is the procedure by which the Boule was compiled.
But, so important was this interplay between structure and disarray to democratic life that it permeated a number of other procedures. A particularly good case in point here is the procedure known as ostracism. Quite simply, ostracism was a yearly procedure which allowed citizens to vote to expel one citizen from the city who, during the course of that year, had become too arrogant, domineering or antagonistic to the order of mass rule.43 Unlike the procedure of pre-democratic exile, which was more akin to violent overthrow, ostracism was a regulated democratic procedure that sanctioned dangerous individuals, individuals whose opinions so contravened popular sentiment as to threaten communal existence. For their transgressions, a 10-year expulsion from the city-state would be enforced. But once served, these individuals would be permitted to re-enter the city, freed of any stigma and with all their possessions intact. While the symbolism of this procedure will be taken up more fully in a later chapter, it is worth noting how ostracism encouraged citizens to think seriously about their freedoms – their own and that of others – as well as the consequences of their actions.
The point that is therefore being made through these rather random examples is this: together, these institutions and procedures reflected both the changing nature of citizenship and the citizenry. Moreover, they acknowledged the irrefutable connections that each citizen had with their social environment – with each other, with those who were not citizens and with those who suffered and perished so that they could live the lives they did. ‘[I]ndividuals have worth just for being individuals’ was the new democratic plea.44 And because this was so, a myriad of previously silent voices and unseen entities started to appear publically, each vying for recognition in their own right. The process that this instigated, while not always successful or stable, was continuous.45 Beyond or intrinsic to having one’s say and being equal, this was the power (kratos) that the people (demos) possessed under democracy (demokratia).46
Democracy read this way becomes somewhat different from how we commonly understand it today. Rather than just being about a form of governance that seeks to establish a stable order grounded in proportional representation, periodic elections and the rule of law, the Athenians understood democracy to mean a struggle that pits the need for order with the open search for disorder. With the movement towards greater equality in Athens, previously untouched and untouchable traditions came under scrutiny. In other words, as democracy took a firmer foothold in Athens’ political imaginary, the way life had been became ever more destabilized, juxtaposed now with what life could be.
This is why Castoriadis quips that the age of democracy would soon be known as one of the less stable and indeed more radical periods in Athenian history.47 The fine balance between order and disorder that democracy required its citizens to maintain, in their own lives and in the life of the community, meant that social norms had to be at once respected and questioned. That this was possible implied that, around the time of the democratic revolution, the Athenian polis had already set about to displace at least certain entrenched traditions of thought and being, which were previously considered beyond questioning. And while it would be incorrect to characterize what occurred as a complete politico-intellectual revolution, it is true to say that after the reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes, Athenian governance, politics and life had turned a corner.
Indeed, with the revolution that swept erstwhile subjects into power, quickened by the intensifying presence of inequality, exploitation and brutality, mass resentment soon instigated a search for real and viable alternatives. From the violent ruptures of the status quo emerged an almost foreign measure of freedom, equality and choice, which rocked the once stable, known and knowable world.48 It was an unsettling time, as accepted customs and practices were dismantled and remade. This is why many scholars believe that when democracy finally materialized, it broke ‘into reality in a way that [was] beyond containment within any closed system of thought’.49
Disorder, in other words, was at the heart of the democratic endeavour. There was unrest, instability and sometimes even anarchy as the polis struggled to come to grips with what had been suppressed for so long. But to some extent, the Greeks had always been a civilization mindful of the fact that there is chaos at the core of all existence.50 It was just that the open search for and recognition of chaos had been politically delegitimized under the dictatorships of Athens’ past. By contrast, what distinguished democracy from these previous forms of governance was precisely its ability to politicize the presence of chaos. Democracy made the entire polis aware that just behind their civilizational constructs and, in particular, their way of life, lay the unknown and a sense of nothingness. It was this subterranean landscape, where their most unspeakable fears and animosities presided, that the institutions and procedures of democracy would progressively disclose to the polis.
To this end, it might be said that democracy emerged as both a way of life and a form of governance that enabled its citizens to appreciate just how the certainties of their lives were susceptible to the menace of the unknown, and that this was not something to fear or suppress. The reason for this was because human life, knowledge and civilization – that is, our existential order – spring from, incorporate into and must ultimately succumb to chaos. Put another way, democracy helped the Greeks to understand that order – or the world they had created, whose mysteries they have slowly unraveled and replaced with knowledge and understanding – will never shroud the chaos from which all things emanate, try as it might. The seemingly implacable order that exudes from human life, knowledge and civilization is fleeting, not to mention imperfect. By recovering chaos, democracy actively sought out, if it only tacitly acknowledged, the limits and flaws within any way of life – particularly one’s own. And this, the democrats believed, was what allowed them to take pleasure in the tragedy of existence; the impetus to think and act freely, to accept one’s shortfalls and the need to look to others in a world blemished by hardship and death. Chaos implores human beings to revel in and then relinquish the gift of life, which is only a rare and fleeting negation of mortality.
Regrettably, at the height of existence, the spectre of chaos can become concealed, quickly forgotten or considered as threatening. That is to say, at the height of existence, questioning, paradox and openness – the means by which we slowly begin to appreciate the place and power of chaos – can take on pejorative connotations. Yet, questioning, paradox and openness were precisely what the democratic movement found wanting, though utterly necessary, within the order of aristocratic Athens. Democratic institutions, equality among citizens and the ability to voice one’s predicament and be heard were entrenched within the polis so as to foreground difference or that which exceeded the parameters of order in Athens. Yet, instead of seeking out just order or chaos to the exclusion of the other, democracy reconciled them. Order and chaos came to function as a paradoxical unison; a constant and dynamic dialogue between that which was and that which was not in the world of ancient Greece. In this way, the object of democracy was to empower the self as well as others, the polis and all that was beyond it, that which was familiar and that which was alien, or that which exists in our world as with the world itself.
Here again, the writings of Castoriadis can help to shed light on this democratic interplay between order and disorder. As he argues in ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, his most influential essay on the links between democracy and tragedy, the presence of chaos would mean that a certain and ultimate system of knowledge could never do if the Athenians were to fully engage the world in which they lived.51 Rather, more creative, inclusive and reflexive modes of thought and action had to be instituted, as Castoriadis believed, given that life was a paradoxical mix of order and chaos, existence and nothingness, self and other. For him at least, this was what (pre-Socratic) notions of philosophy and politics captured. And, it was what democracy was created to capture.
For all these reasons, Castoriadis held the view that Athenian democracy had to be grounded in what he calls the project of autonomy,52 something he defines as ‘the reflective questioning of socially instituted representations, including those instituted with the help of philosophical reflection’.53 Democracy in Athens was, therefore, not chiefly about the demarcation of universally applicable principles. Democratic thought did not presuppose a stagnant, knowable world that could be definitely theorized once and for all. Nor did it insinuate, on the other hand, that nothing was knowable or constant. Instead, it realized that all things sat uneasily, reflexively between these two poles of existence, like existence itself.
As Castoriadis goes on to affirm, this conception of democracy is the sum of a perpetual tussle between the forces of self-institution and self-limitation. As a brand of politics, it obliges its constituents to appreciate that their existence – all that is known and meaningful to them – is the result of creation or institution, which itself presupposes two things.
First, it recognizes that ‘the collectivity . . . can only exist as instituted’, to use Castoriadis’ words.54 This means that for human lives and civilization to flourish, to be meaningful and productive, certain concrete structures and systems of knowledge must be established. In other words, we need to fashion an order from manifest chaos, existence from nothingness and meaning from apparent meaninglessness. We need, argues Castoriadis, the ‘validity and legitimacy of rules and representations just because they happen to be there [such as those dictated to us by an] external authority (even, and especially, “divine”), of any extrasocial source of truth and justice’.55 We need institution. Democracy gave the people, or its citizens to be more precise, the explicit right of institution, individually and as a polis. It gave them the right of self-institution. Each citizen, as such, was granted the power to fashion and maintain a way of life that would be meaningful to them. To help them imagine new futures and to cope with what they had imagined, a range of sources, including fictional ones like tragedy, became essential to politics. Reaching back into the mythic past, these democrats likened their own daring to the great heroes of the Homeric epics. Conceptualizations of reality became fluidly fused with fictional tales and characters from Athens’ past. But intrinsic to this right was the concomitant responsibility: to ‘live with and even respect the voices’ of those one opposed and was opposed by.56 This was democratic self-institution.57
Second, by recognizing that the collectivity exists only because of self-institution is also to recognize, and perhaps even recover, the chaos, nothingness and meaninglessness which gave rise to order, existence and meaning in the first place. As such, the collectivity had to be called upon to confront ‘its instituting character explicitly, and [question] itself and its own activities’.58 It had to, as part of its self-institution, always be mindful of and ready for self-limitation. One’s need of and right to self-institution intrinsically subjects oneself to the grips of self-limitation.
The unenviable reconciliation between these two diametrically opposed ends, which alone seek to capture existence but together enable humans to exist, was a democratic one. Self-institution must incorporate and is as necessary for existence as self-limitation. To have one and not the other ensures life as an unbearable burden, a farce and the antithesis of democracy.
This, in sum, was what the socio-historical, institutional and existential underpinnings of Athenian democracy instituted: a novel or previously impossible solidarity between what was and what could be.59 By questioning the polis and the self of Athenian civilization, democracy reminded the Athenians that ‘all citizens have the possibility of attaining a correct doxa [opinion] and that nobody possesses an épisteme [certain knowledge] of all things political’.60 On all fronts, this encouraged greater daring and arrogance, even violence – only to be matched with a corresponding level of humility and openness. In this duel between order and chaos, extremity was met with balance, involvement with detachment, the concrete with the reflective and peace with violence; all of which was captured by Pericles when he declared, ‘for everything that grows great also decays’.61
This was the paradoxical lesson at democracy’s heart: ‘What includes excludes’.62 For while the citizens of Athens increasingly saw themselves as equally important parts of a whole, this ‘whole’ also sustained the monsters of imperialism, war and slavery, not to mention the political exclusion of women, foreigners and children. Democracy, in a very real and undeniable sense, sustained itself on a slave economy and the political exclusion of women and barbarians. Not only that, but democracy did not always function in practice the way it was conceived to do. The everyday pressures, biases and trivialities associated with politicking regularly consumed the idea and practice of democracy in Athens. It was imperfect and, if we use today’s standards to assess it, hardly democratic at all. Yet, this was all part and parcel of the Athenians’ first effort to found democracy against a backdrop of domination, hierarchy, exclusion and injustice. For all its manifest advances, the West’s first great democracy cannot be divorced from these less savory realities.63
But that, as this section has demonstrated, was an inevitable part of democracy’s attempt to balance self-institution with self-limitation. Its failures, varied and many, also gave rise to the understanding that any opening would itself induce another, more entrenched closure that might be equally unjust and violent.64 Any order must necessarily recognize its limits: what lies beyond and sustains it. For this reason, the process of self-institution and self-limitation must be continuous, just as the tussle between order and chaos is continuous. Today, if we remember just one thing about the Athenians’ democracy, it should be this.
Being as chaos: Tragedy’s democratic intervention
The upshot of a political project so radical and unstable was threefold at least. The first was the extremely delicate and volatile nature of democracy. Here was a nascent system of governance that not only benefited from but also actually depended upon the active participation of all its citizens. Yet, used to a lifetime of dictatorship, this was an enormous challenge with countless risks for an uninitiated and inexperienced citizenry. How would the people exercise their power? And what could inspire and teach them to do so? Added to this was a second concern: democracy was a regime that encouraged creation along with destruction, inclusion with exclusion and civilization with violence. Democracy was unpredictable for the very reason that the world it sought to capture was unpredictable, and paradoxical too. To capture it successfully would require new techniques and greater daring. And so the third upshot: the democratic forces unleashed both required and inspired more resourceful ways of thinking and acting – which, as the Athenians found out, could not be limited simply to what took place in the Ekklesia, Boule or the popular courts. This explains why the democratic revolution coincided with a cultural one, wherein philosophy, politics and artistic expression fused organically to give expression to the new uncertainty.65
Indeed, with Cleisthenes’ reforms, a new philosophically informed ‘aestheticization’ became necessary to nourish and inform the political sphere.66 What was now needed and pursued were other, more nuanced ways of disclosing and coping with the new sense of existence. No longer were dogma and unthinking traditionalism to be esteemed, but an innovative irreverence that would be content only when the answers provided sparked new questions, which demanded answering. This was an artistic–intellectual endeavour that would continually open and transform the Greek world. Athens, being the centre of this world, was both the progeny and progenitor of this continuous state of flux.
Tragedy was a direct corollary of these artistic–intellectual endeavours.67 Even more than that, tragedy was shaped into a political institution of sorts under democracy so as to check the democratic forces being unleashed. Unlike in more contemporary times, the performance of tragedy in Athens was not primarily a matter of entertainment. It was, instead, an important site of democratic politics. So popular was tragedy that over 1,000 plays were produced in Athens in the fifth century alone.68 Today, we only possess a minute fraction of them, occupying a time frame from 472 BC (Aeschylus’ Persians) to 402 BC (Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonos). Specifically, six plays from Aeschylus, seven plays from Sophocles and nineteen plays from Euripides survive.69
As the city’s official storytellers and political philosophers, these tragedians educated theatre audiences on questions of morality, politics, philosophy and the arts. But beyond that, they represented issues on morality, politics and philosophy differently – that is to say, artistically. Quite simply, these dramatists took the stories, characters and ideas of their ancestors and recreated them for their contemporaries. The people heeded these tragedies as they would the teachings of the city’s statesmen or philosophers. What this indicates is that ‘[t]he ancient Greeks theorized in theater as much as they dramatized theory in the Platonic cave’.70 All of it, as Constantinou continues, formed part of ‘the ambit of the affairs of the polis’. The democrats were drawn to this medium, this fictional art form, which also became a political art form that was valued for the way that it weaved between reality and fiction and back again. It became a unique form of political discourse.
Most commonly structured around divisions between law and nature, mortal and divine, male and female, family and state, the inside and outside, tragedy comprised fictional plots that dramatized the logic and framework of heroic personas met with insurmountable dilemmas.71 Heroes tended to be venerable though not necessarily loveable, intelligent without being completely wise and independent while still inexorably subject to the whim of nature.72 Because of this, their downfall, the kernel from which these tragedies typically germinate, evoked a sense of empathy and irony, and perhaps even inevitability. As figures that aspire for the best only to be rewarded with the worst, tragedy unveiled ‘that efforts to limit suffering through the accumulation of knowledge or power might invite more suffering’.73 Yet, this is the paradoxical logic which pervades the world. And having seen and exposed it, tragedy pled with human beings to be mindful of the structures they erect and reside in, to know that they do not always know and to remain ready and able to adapt.
One’s refusal or inability, but sometimes even one’s ability, to do so explains why the essence of tragic drama was imbued with insurmountable conflicts or agons. Representing the duel between two or more competing ends, all with an equally rightful claim, the agon presented to tragic heroes the choice between compromise, something which in time would betray their deepest aspirations even as it keeps them alive, or realization, whose pursuit will bring with it greatness but at the highest price. The agon permits no middle ground. It says to the ‘[t]he soul’ that she ‘must, in her housekeeping, waste to save, and what she wastes is initially as costly, as precious, as desirable as what she keeps’.74
By staging the outbreak and resolution of these existential crises, the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, therefore, had the effect of reminding audiences that life is ephemeral, the result of which can trigger a search for certainty and even immortality – fixations which are impossible to divorce from one’s own arrogance, folly and downfall. Yet, in hinging open the underbelly of order, in unsettling the dominant myths and orthodoxies that, for some, have sustained life so well, tragedy also underlined how pain and destruction are an inevitable part of life. Living with a fuller appreciation of this can never be easy. But to live any other way is merely to live by a delusion.
For our purposes then, the important thing is that tragedy, by exposing the delusions that all humans live by, somehow also echoed the sentiment and ethos that democracy had begun to convey within the Athenian polis. How it came to do this, to speak democratically in other words, is really the fundamental question. And it is a question that cannot be answered satisfactorily, at least in the way which this book seeks to do, without first answering the other fundamental question, which is: why and how did the practice of tragedy develop?
Questions regarding the origins and development of tragedy have long plagued scholars fascinated by the classical world. Despite this, the answers they have come up with have not so much been conclusive explanations as suggestive theories. And what they have suggested by and large seems to go something like this.
Long before tragedy came to be associated with familiar names like Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, we are given to understand that tragedy had less to do with drama as we know it than it did with a ‘goat’ or ‘goat song’.75 Though no doubt odd, since extant tragedies have practically nothing to do with goats or rituals involving goats, this lineage can be traced back to the notion of the Dionysian and its artistic embodiment in the half-man, half-beast satyr. Essentially, as the theory goes, tragedy’s origins are either linked to or inspired by a primal life force that precedes and terrorizes any life form constructed by humankind. This is a life force that conjures in us sentiments of excess, mysticism, fusion and the sublime – ultimately leading to the dissolution of our subjectivity and even our existence.76 Yet, beyond the pretence that life is important or that our constructed realities are enduring, this was not, in essence, a horrifying revelation. Instead, what horror and pain it disclosed was done so in the presence of a nascent wonder and joy that could be just as overwhelming. This was the Dionysian state embodied in the satyr and the satyrikon (or dithyramb). As the epitome of Dionysian revelry, the satyr was the primordial (goat-like) being who personified this truth and rawness.77 It understood the need for civilization, but also saw in it a futile quest for unobtainable permanence. Wedged between these two conflicting worlds, and tormented by anguish, the satyr, nonetheless, could find reassurance in a chaotic sense of bliss. The dithyramb–satyrikon became the purest expression of this. Through the satyrs’ revelry, a heady mix of madness, intoxication, self-abandonment, pain and their opposites were given a release.78
But this, of course, was only the origins from which tragic drama would emerge. The development of tragedy as a form of drama would be another matter altogether. Indeed, though the dithyramb–satyrikon had rightly captured life’s tragedy, it did not translate it into theatrical drama. That crucial step came with the Revolution of Arion who, in 600 BC, incorporated the dithyramb into the chorus, a lyric dance that used music to accompany and coordinate speech and imitative gesture.79 In laymen’s terms, what Arion did was to introduce structure and rigidity to the unadulterated dance of the satyrs. Its importance for us lies not in the technicalities but the amalgamation of three opposing life forces: discipline with abandon, intellect with emotion and the stationary with the dynamic, for instance.80 In doing this, Arion did more than structure Dionysian expression; he introduced the Apollonian forces of order, rationality and certainty to offset an otherwise chaotic existence.81 As Nietzsche would later write, the implications of this union had profound effects, not least for the birth of tragedy in fifth-century Athens.82
But, we should not make the mistake from this overly simplified account that the tragedy which emerged was somehow monolithic in form and content. It was not. As a form of drama, tragedy would undergo numerous vital changes and reflect variously the broader sociopolitical shifts of the day. For instance, Patricia Easterling makes the point that Aeschylean tragedy is commonly assumed to be the most primitive of all extant tragedies, while Sophoclean tragedy is somehow representative of the art form’s pinnacle, and Euripidean tragedy, by contrast, marks the drama’s decline.83 Indeed, with Euripides’ introduction of the deus ex machina or ‘the god of machines’, some commentators have argued that audiences were denied the ability to suffer and experience the joys that come through suffering. Instead, they, like Euripides himself, were starved of the opportunity for reconciliation through tragedy and, in turn, they eventually lost faith in tragedy as a social and political institution. Others, like William Ridgeway, would contest this view. For Ridgeway, it was not Euripides’ tragedies that were infused with rationalism and optimism, but Aeschylus’. It was Aeschylus, as Ridgeway writes, who ‘had the sublime confidence that by rightly employing their reason men could avoid catastrophe’.84 To this end, there is no actual evidence that Euripides was under Socrates’ spell, as some believe he was, and we should not so easily conclude that his dramatic productions moved tragedy closer to philosophy. ‘While the superabundance of dialectical fireworks in some Euripidean tragedies dissipates out tragic emotions’, Ridgeway draws the conclusion that ‘it usually illustrates the futility of reason, its inability to prevent tragedy’. This demonstrates the variations in tragedy and the various ways we can interpret both the tragedies and the tragedians who created them. While some would argue that Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ productions represent the purest examples of tragedy, others believe that the more subversive and indeed more tragic dramas came from Euripides.
These caveats aside, though, the overall point to recall here is that tragedy was really more than just drama. That is to say, drama’s importance was not just dramatic. It conveyed a crucial existential message, one which had undergone a continuous process of disclosure and concealment. Tragedy dramatized that process; the subsequent developments in actors, action and plot being slotted in for ‘dramatic effect’. This explains why, for Peter Euben, drama was so central to the Greek way of life.85
More specifically, this begins to explain why tragic drama would become so central to the democratic way of life. True, tragedy was chiefly a dramatic art form. Yet, as should already be clear, Greek drama was, in many ways, ‘inseparable from the ancient Greek political process’, given that, for Constantinou, it was ‘a medium of critique and self-reflectiveness’.86 This is no less the case for tragic drama which, despite its pre-democratic origins,87 really only began its true ascendancy with the rise of democracy.88 Such was tragedy’s democratic impact that many even identify it as the site where both the spirit and practice of democracy were truly given life.89
Specifically, as Christian Meier contends, tragedy was as necessary to the Athenians during this time of great upheaval as their Assembly, Council and other democratic institutions.90 It was a political medium that gave expression to both order and chaos. It debunked the absolute certainty and life force that had sustained the aristocratic world without debunking the certainty and life force needed to sustain the Greek world.91 And it inflected the problems caused by the escalating numbers of political actors; the dispersal of power and responsibilities; the rise of novel and abstract ideas; the lack of time-honoured state apparatus and the pervasiveness of human arrogance and violence into something that prompted and challenged the Athenians to act, without leaving them overwhelmed or indignant. Because of this, Stephen Chan has said that ‘it was not in the Athenian agora, the public debates, that concepts of justice were determined, but in the Athenian theatre’.92 Through the creation of a valued institutional space, the Athenians were taught to reflect on themselves and the world they lived in. By detaching themselves from reality – using fiction to address issues too difficult to express in reality – they were emotionally strengthened to re-engage their reality with a greater level of commitment. In short, through telling stories – dramatizing them for all to see – order can be given to phenomena which would otherwise have seemed chaotic.
And so, dramatized in a stylized fashion, tragedy represented a world of marked heterogeneity and tension, of characters and circumstances enticed by glory and wrought with chaos. In these portrayals of existence, it was possible to see not only a myriad of individuals, even those marginalized in everyday Athenian society, but also the ideological status quo and desires which undergirded and challenged the evolving polis. Dissonance, therefore, was crucial to tragedy. And this is why tragedy was so crucial to democracy.
In fact, the very same dissonance which democracy had slowly begun to unveil struck at the very heart of the tragic festivals of the City Dionysia and Lenaia, which took place in Athens each year. During these festivals, which were akin to national days of celebration, Athens opened her doors to the Greek world and paid homage to all that was great and enviable about the city-state.93 Featured in this Panhellenic festival were ceremonial rituals and displays, all of which were aimed at demonstrating just how financially wealthy, politically ascendant and militarily powerful the city was.94 This spectacle was further intensified by the spatial arrangement of the audience.95 Seated together in one theatre were block after block of citizens, statesmen, soldiers, foreign dignitaries and even women and slaves. The product was the creation of a unique citizen body and civic gaze. In various ways, this assembly, which often drew as many as 20,000 spectators,96 reminded each individual of the importance of past and future military sacrifice, of the polis as a benevolent carer and educator and, most of all, that order must be maintained for the good of all.97 These, of course, were the explicit aspirations of the Athenian state too, which was tasked with the responsibility of organizing these festivals.98 It was the city’s duty to coordinate, fund and select the poets, plays and eventual victors of these festivals. Poets and arbiters alike would therefore have had to been conscious of the plays’ literary, philosophical as well as its political tone. For all these reasons, Simon Goldhill concludes that ‘[e]ach of these ceremonials in different ways promotes and projects an idea and ideal of citizen participation in the state and an image of the power of the polis of Athens. It uses the civic occasion to glorify the polis’.99
But, polis glorification was never the sole purpose of the festivals of the Dionysia and Lenaia. In fact, set against the grain of the festivals’ Athenocentrism was always a more Panhellenic and politically subversive thrust.100 Being festivals of Panhellenic significance, the Athenocentrism exuded was met, received and problematized by a heterogeneous response. Opening her doors to the Greek world meant Athens also had to open her soul to influences previously foreign, invisible or feared. In such an environment, Athenians would no doubt have confronted issues and peoples not known or not wanted. And this openness also permeated domestic structures too. It is widely acknowledged that, during these festivals, a public place was reserved for the city’s women, children, slaves and foreigners, individuals who normally had no political standing.101 Whether or not they attended en masse is contested. But the frank authorization of their presence indicates an extreme deviation from the norm which Athenian civilization had erected. Within this state of inversion, citizens, foreigners and private individuals revelled as one under the figurehead of Dionysus, the god of intoxication and the ‘every man’.102 A dichotomy, as such, was ‘set up between the structured and stable picture of Athenian citizens in their rows of civic order, in a setting imbued with the strength and stability of Athenian legitimacy in Greece, and the tenuous, unpredictable, unstable nature of life’.103
This dissonance, crucial to democratic politics, was also evident within the tragic dramas themselves. On the one hand, as both Edith Hall and Michael Zelanak have noted, tragedy frequently celebrated the greatness of Athens.104 Whether through its dramatization of great heroes or its endorsement of Athenian identity vis-à-vis barbarian identities, a definite arrogance and xenophobia perforated these dramas. All that was heroic, wise and great, the tragedies proclaimed, pointed to Athens. Even dramatizations of controversies and transgressions against the Athenian polis were but evidence of what the Athenian psyche and system could accommodate. Yet, as would typically be the case in tragic plots, the disarray and dissidence would ultimately be met with a satisfactory end, which would only further valorize the Athenian way of life.
Even so, tragedy characteristically lent itself to a variety of sometimes contradictory interpretations, some of which were not always complementary of Athens or its way of life.105 Depending on the social and political backdrop in which the drama was performed, tragedy could just as easily champion, question or even subvert the democratic polis. Frictions or agons were created to draw out, among other things, the relationships between democracy, patriotism, xenophobia and empire. Because of this, tragedy often drew attention to the heroism of marginal figures and the issues which occupied their existence. From women, children and slaves to foreigners, tragic plots delved into taboo themes revolving around the family, sexual deviancy, murder, greed, the horrors of war and the unsustainability of Athens’ political order.
First staged in 458 BC, during a time when political infighting and factionalism had nearly torn Athens apart, Aeschylus’ Eumenides gives us an example of just how a tragedy could dramatize and even heal the rifts which threatened to split the society in two. As the last instalment in the Oresteia trilogy, Eumenides sits at the end of a series where from familial turmoil Aeschylus goes on to dramatize the inability of murder and revenge to ever bring justice about. In this third play, having taken his revenge on Clytemnestra his mother, Orestes is finally made to stand before the Areopagus to learn his fate. What is interesting about this is that only three years prior to the trilogy’s premiere, in 462/461 BC, the actual Areopagus had just been disbanded, with its powers transferred in full to the more democratic Ekklesia. The event, which was the source of much infighting and bloodshed in Athens, eventually cost the life of Ephialtes, who was murdered by his political adversaries for spearheading the democratic reform.106 Though the democrats of Athens were on the precipice of winning a key political victory, it was true that the city was teetering on the brink of civil war, hampered by widespread violence, animosity and revenge. These were the very themes that found their way into the three tragedies which make up Aeschylus’ Oresteia.
Proceeding in three steps, the trilogy is a cycle that begins with murder, goes on to revenge and ends with justice. From a wife who murders her husband to a son who takes revenge on his mother, it ends with his trial before the Areopagus in Athens. While the play is profusely imbued with mythical significations, its plot line effectively revolves around the fate and ultimate acquittal of the son, Orestes, at the hands of the Athenian jurors. It is the collective responsibility of the Athenian people, in other words, to mete out justice. Having transferred the Areopagus’ power to the collectivity, Aeschylus does two things. First, he transfers authority from the minority to the majority. Second, he marks a metaphorical shift away from the system of revenge and violence, prevalent in the earlier instalments of the trilogy, towards a regime based on a justice that represents and is decided upon by the entire citizen body.107 This echoed the events that had rocked Athens not so long ago and, in its own way, called upon the Athenians to refrain from revenge and violence. Rather, like its Athenian jurors, Eumenides petitioned the citizens of Athens to confront the uncertain times and the difficult questions they gave rise to together, through peaceful and open means. It is in this way that tragedies like Aeschylus’ Eumenides affirmed and then problematized the pride of Athens in a manner that was overtly political.
Tragedy, as such, was a site of paradox, pursuant to the ‘god of paradox’, Dionysus, under whose name these plays were performed.108 As the god of theatre, Paul Monaghan argues that Dionysus embodied a dissonance that was fundamental to tragic drama: ‘a tension between things, between script and actor, present and not present, real and not real, performance and audience’.109 Moreover, it is in the ‘interplay between norm and transgression’ where, for Goldhill, our ‘understanding of the tragic moment will lie’.110
To begin to draw all this together, we turn one last time to the theorizations of Castoriadis, who sums up what tragedy disclosed through the simple dictum that our ‘Being is Chaos’.111 Whether considered from an institutional or an ontological perspective, what tragedy does, in essence, is to recall us to the fact that Being will always be returned to Chaos. This, in short, is the post-foundational certitude embedded within tragedy.
Synonymous with the order that is produced through human life, knowledge and civilization, tragedy can therefore help us to understand our Being as Chaos in two important ways. The first way is through human hubris or excessive individuation. In popular conceptions, as Nathalie Karagiannis notes, the Greek view of hubris sees humankind consumed in a self-deluded attempt to transcend our very humanness, to defy all that prevents us mortals from attaining immortality.112 Hubris, as such, insinuates that there are limits which are known to humankind and that we, nevertheless, attempt to transgress to further our own Being. Yet, in Castoriadis’ account, hubris is perhaps more a corollary of the fact that human beings do not know, and may never know, their own limits.113 The crucial marker which states that human beings have gone too far, that they have become inhuman, is nowhere to be found, perhaps until too late. All that we can do is to keep striving, all the while knowing that there are limits. This is why Chaos, for Castoriadis, ‘is presented as Chaos in man, that is, as his hubris’.114 Human beings, by the very fact that we exist, embody hubris precisely because our existence is premised on the continuous effort to defy the unknown and unknowable.
But, hubris as Chaos only embodies Chaos in life. Chaos in death, or death itself, is what actually poses the greatest threat to Being. While we may all want to believe otherwise, death constitutes the greatest unknown in life. In and through its constant reminders of human mortality, tragic plays therefore exuded this second manifestation of Chaos in Being, which can be understood through the wisdom of Silenus, who declared that ‘[t]he very best thing is utterly beyond your reach not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon’.115
Read this way and what we can hold to be certain and true becomes not the life, knowledge and civilization that we have constructed and profited from. This is because inherent to its truth is always another, more enduring certitude, one which has no positive foundation.116 Through these fictional depictions, where heroes fall and society’s outcasts rise, tragic drama thus ‘gave its audience a semi-vicarious experience of the fluidity and unpredictability of life where the membrane surrounding the civilised order is seen to be thin and porous’.117 Beyond the theatricality of the drama, tragedy theorized into Athenian praxis the need to confront and negate the very civic and religious order needed to sustain life so as to grasp its true signification and the darkness that human beings refuse to be blinded by.118 Only by doing this, can we even glimpse the fragile – and at times dark – nature of existence.
Applied to politics, it becomes easy to see why tragedy was able to echo some of the more existential sentiments that democracy had begun to raise within the Athenian polis. This is particularly so if we turn to another illustrative example, this time Sophocles’ well-known tragedy Antigone, for illumination.119 First staged in Athens around 442 BC, Sophocles’ tragedy was set against a backdrop of both Athenian greatness and decadence.120 Pericles, the great democratic ruler of Athens, had only just initiated policies which sought to elevate political allegiance to the state above all else, including those owed to other individuals and to one’s own family. All citizens were bound by this decree: bound to serve and follow the polis first and foremost. Against these political developments, Sophocles thrust the figure of Antigone onto the city’s stage, perhaps as a deft critique of the newly emerging order within Periclean Athens.
Set in mythic Thebes, Antigone revolved around the question of political supremacy. Unable to share and resolve their equal claims to the Theban throne, Sophocles has Antigone’s brothers – Eteocles and Polyneices – meet sword with sword in a deadly battle that ultimately leads to their deaths. Wishing to restore order, their uncle Creon, as the new king, quickly decrees that Eteocles, the brother who remained loyal to Thebes, will be buried with full honours. The traitor Polyneices, on the other hand, will lie unburied, unmourned and unforgiven.
A city, Creon rationalizes, cannot survive without order. If Thebes is not to descend further into chaos, it must firmly entrench order and reprimand those who would rob it of order. The memory of Polyneices, through Creon’s decree, would serve as a reminder of this. For Antigone, though, Creon’s decree does not carry the weight of law. Order is not man’s to have, in her reasoning, least of all when it impugns the designs of the gods. Order at Polyneices’ expense is no just order at all.
For the audiences in Athens, this performance – replete with political allusions – would quite possibly have invigorated intense reflection and interested debate. In the first instance, some may well have drawn analogies between the rising prominence of Pericles in Athens with the prominence of Creon in Thebes. Others may have glimpsed the insidious nature of order when it is thrust arbitrarily upon a society. For Antigone, his niece, Haemon, his son, Eurydice, his wife and even for Creon himself, the order embodied by Creon’s decree was to be the very order that would destroy them. In other words, the institution of his Being, seen as necessary in his eyes, would be what causes his eventual demise. Deaf to the pleas of Antigone, and in fact to the whole of Thebes, Creon blindly, confidently goes it alone. His tragedy, or so Sophocles appears to intimate, is his inability to hear others. When Haemon bids Creon ‘not to be wise alone’, herein, Castoriadis believes, are democracy’s precepts laid bare.121
This is why tragedy so poignantly echoed the democratic ambition to balance self-institution with self-limitation: because it reiterated through a dramatic medium the democratic point that any conception of order necessarily shrouds though ultimately succumbs to chaos. That, thanks to tragedy, was something The Ancient Greeks learnt to appreciate at the peak of their creativeness, a peak which gave rise to the prominence of tragic art within the newly democratized polis of Athens.122
And so , ‘Athenian tragedy’s claim to having been a truly democratic art-form’ was, as Edith Hall argues, ‘paradoxically, far greater than the claim to democracy of the Athenian state itself’.123 By ensconcing a diverse collectivity of individuals into one forum, citizens, dignitaries, soldiers, women and slaves found themselves better equipped to acknowledge, critique and reconcile a greater range of possibilities in life. They became more aware, if not more able, to reconcile themselves with others. Doing so helped to avert the extremes of both radical homogeneity and heterogeneity for something more precarious and contingent.124 Despite his overt antipathy to liberal democracy, Nietzsche, nevertheless, believed that tragedy could compel its audiences to participate ‘in other souls’ and to ‘look at the world through many eyes’.125
This had obvious practical implications. For one, tragedy provided an opportunity for the polis to reflect, away from the pressures of everyday politics and existence, on aspects of communal life that were pressing and, because they were pressing, could not always be freely discussed in reality. The decisions made and the paths taken were juxtaposed – using fictional means – with those that were not made and not taken. An aesthetic experience of this kind had the potential to effect ‘positive empowerment and emancipation, liberating sensuousness from the tyranny of reason, releasing libidinal energies and turning “labor” into “play”, making life lighter and civilization less repressive’.126 At the same time, it also courted a deeper engagement, one which inevitably folded back onto itself. By playing on emotional, rational and physical faculties alike, tragedy depicted individual life as that moment of glory we all long for and yet never quite manage to grasp on to for long or in any meaningful way. Life’s transience and the incapacity of human beings were manifested in terms of what we try so hard to evade, suppress and demonize. At its most explicit, this was the world of Athens: the women, children, slaves and foreigners who embodied a chaotic diversity that exceeded even the openness of democracy. And though no empirical evidence avails to suggest that tragedy had a direct political impact, its political contribution cannot be so easily discounted. Rather, ‘[i]n just that noisy dialogism, in its disagreements, verbal contests, dismayed reactions, doubts, and second thoughts, Athenian tragedy largely reflect[ed] the discursive civic context in which it flourished’.127 It exorcized the travails of Athens onstage so that Athenians could better live – with demons and all – off stage. Through entertaining fiction, Athens was made more able to live with the diverse realities that exist in fact.
Is this is not politics? And democratic politics at that? The process whereby an individual comes to appreciate themselves as a social being, with rights and responsibilities pertaining to that condition, is precisely the point where politics is needed as a tool of mediation. Likewise, the point when a collective begins to live in anticipation of what one another, indeed all others, might have to say about existence, even if it is said against them, is when democratic politics becomes an ontological base. For this reason, democratic politics is always more, and requires more, than just what political tools make possible. Beneath the laws, institutions and structures of Athens’ democratic state, this ‘moment of anti-politics’ was fundamentally what tragedy alluded to.128 This was the moment – which remains forever present – that first inspired politics but which politics cannot always adequately give expression to. The restorative capacity of tragedy seized on this and, in so doing, ‘not only relieved the Greeks of the tensions and agony of political life, but reminded them that politics could not absorb the diversity of life’.129 In the plots, characters and language of the Greeks’ tragedies, these were the sensitivities that found their way, after the festivals of the Dionysia and Lenaia, back into the political realities that democracy had begun to construct in Athens.